#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Encode::Guess;

if(@ARGV != 1)
{
    print "Usage: perl $0 <file to analyze>\n";
    exit;
}

my @files = glob($ARGV[0]);

foreach my $file (@files)
{
    open(FILE,$file);
    binmode(FILE);
    if(read(FILE,my $filestart, 500)) {
	my $enc = guess_encoding($filestart);
	if(ref($enc)) {
	    print "$file:\t",$enc->name,"\n";
	}
	else {
	    print "Encoding of file $file can't be guessed\n";
	}
    }
    else {
	print "Cannot read from file $file\n";
    }
}

close(FILE);

• it is true that users are in control and have the choice to participate/not participate - one reason why controlled languages likely won't work in this context
• online communities need a balance of the opportunity to create subcultures but also provide a degree of leakage so that people can get to know "familiar strangers" - an interesting question here would be how to create this leakage across multiple languages and of course if this makes sense
• machine translation doesn't have to encode the cultural conventions of the developer - especially statistical machine translation systems are quite language-independent